LibriVox recording of The Diary of a Dead Officer, by Arthur Graeme West. Read by Ruth Golding.

Published posthumously in 1919, this collection of diary entries presents a scathing picture of army life and is said to be one of the most vivid accounts of daily life in the trenches. It chronicles West's increasing disillusion with war and his move toward pacifist and atheist beliefs. The final part consists of his powerful war poems, including God, How I Hate You, You Young Cheerful Men, and Night Patrol. West was killed by a sniper in 1917. In view of some of his poems, one wonders if death was not unwelcome. (Introduction adapted from Wikipedia by Ruth Golding)

Details of the source text may be found on the LibriVox catalogue page for this item.

M4B audiobook of complete book

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This audio is part of the collection: The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection
It also belongs to collections: Audio Books & Poetry; Community Audio

Artist/Composer: Arthur Graeme West
Date: 2010-10-23
Source: Librivox recording of a public-domain text
Keywords: librivox; audiobook; World War One; WWI; war poet; war poetry; First World War; pacifism; atheism; pacifist; atheist; officer training; trench warfare; Kitchener's Army

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: stbalbach - - November 23, 2010
Subject: The Diary of a Dead Officer

Arthur Graeme West was an English soldier and poet who died in the trenches of France in 1917, from a sniper bullet. He left behind a mass of papers which his friends turned into a book soon after the war. It contains scattered diary entries, not really a memoir, and a collection of poems, the most famous being `The Night Patrol`

And we placed our hands on the topmost sand-bags, leapt, and stood.
Wormed our selves tinkling through, glanced back, and dropped.
The sodden ground was splashed with shallow pools,
And tufts of crackling cornstalks, two years old,
No man had reaped, and patches of spring grass.

In West's diary we see how he changes over time, from a patriotic soldier to a strong anti-war thinker, from religious believer to atheist, as he becomes increasingly despondent at the futility and waste of war. He sees the greatest purpose in life as the opposite of pain, namely pleasure (physical, mental), and anyone who denies that pleasure (which he calls happiness) has no right to do so. He was about 50 years ahead of his time, the entire baby boomer generation would say the same thing during the 1960s. His book was published in 1919 and it received some attention at the time, but more so recently, he's today probably considered a minor author of the WWI canon.

Listen via the always wonderful narrator Ruth Golding at LibriVox, with original text as scanned book at Internet Archive.

[STB | 11-2010 | 525]